What technologies are using the most influential Internet companies?

Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Hotmail (Windows Live), Twitter, LinkedIn, Amazon.com, WordPress.com, eBay, Bing… You may know probably all these companies; we use some on our daily basis. They bring services to around 2 billion people! And influence our lives everyday. The most influential Internet companies are in the search engine and social media category, so I will focus the analysis in these two.

Search Engines

Google -> 1,000,000,000 = 1 billion unique visitors /month

Yahoo! Sites -> 689,000,000 unique visitors /month

Bing/Microsoft Sites -> 905,000,000 unique visitors /month

Social Media

Facebook: 750,000,000+ users

Twitter: 200,000,000 users

Gmail: 193,000,000 users

LinkedIn: 100,000,000+ users

Flickr: 32,000,000 users

Google+: unknown yet, but growing quickly!

All these websites have something in common: huge amount of traffic! So, there technologies should scale, support high concurrency and easy to maintain. All these features are a good measure to know what programming language you should focus next. Learn from what is already working. All right! Now comes the interesting part! Let see what is happening behind the scenes!

Facebook

Technologies used:

PHP (main programming language)

HipHop for PHP (translate PHP to C++)

MySQL (database)

Cassandra (distributed database management system)

Memcached (distributed memory cache)

Thrift (integration between many programming languages)

Other languages: Java, Erlang, C++, …

A lot of tweaks for optimization, custom extensions. For instance, they used modified a Linux distribution to optimized it for Memcached.

Adrian Mejia is a full-stack web developer working at Cisco in Boston. Currently working at Cisco as a Software Engineer. Adrian enjoys writing books and posts about programming, technologies and nerdy stuff. Find our more here.